COURSE of the MONTH

Illustrator to PDF - unwanted white horizontal lines

I have an EPS image that is placed in an Illustrator file. When I print to PDF distiller from Illustrator, the resulting PDF has a few very thin white horizontal lines across the image. I do not know how to get rid of these. Can someone please help?

i've seen this before, those 'thin white lines' are rectangular and usually around an element of some kind with a transparency effect.

in my experience its only been something one sees on screen but prints fine. because it prints fine, i've never persued this much further. if it's imperative that they go away i would suggest maybe running rasterizing it through photoshop.

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garryvAuthor Commented: 2007-03-27

no this is not what I am seeing. they are not rectangular - they are straight horizontal lines and there are about 3 of them visible.

It has been my experience that these artifacts are the result of transparency flattening and usually only occur when the PDF is prepared using one of the higher quality settings. Since these settings are primarily used when the PDF is intended for use in printing, and since the artifacts don't show up in printing, I usually just ignore them.

If the PDF is intended for multiple purposes and the artifacts on screen are an issue, I suggest you flatten the artwork in Illustrator before creating the PDF. Be sure to maintain a copy of the unflattened artwork, though. If the artifacts still appear when flattened in Illustrator, try separating the transparent object and all objects beneath it onto a separate layer and raserize those objects in Illustrator instead of flattening them. Flattening the transparency creates a puzzle of adjacent images around the transparency. Where these adjacent images meet is where the artifacts are showing up. Rasterizing the objects simply merges them all into one whole image with no conditions for artifacts.